Tuesday, June 12, 2012

...and now, the news.

From the news yesterday morning:

Here in Indy we had a drunk driver hit a sober cop, just, you know, for a change of pace.

The chick on the business segment at CNN was telling us how exciting! for investors! the news from Spain was! But the smile was plastered to her face and there was a "Help me!" look in her eyes, like there was someone just off camera with a gun pointed at her. I guess nobody believed her, anyway.

Eric Holder announced that he was shocked, shocked! to find that there were leaks of classified information from the Obama administration, and he would investigate it immediately. I have no idea how the newscaster read that line with a straight face; this is like expecting the minister for Reich security in 1940s Germany to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Jews.

Now, now. Let's be fair. It was a stupid ruling by the state supreme court. Which happens to have a few idiots on it. Of whom we hope to unseat at least one in November. Who happens to be the idiot who wrote the stupid ruling.

And Drudge, as usual, is being hyperbolic about it. All the state is saying is that police need to be polite, knock, and present a proper search warrant before they come barging into your castle in the middle of the night, or else they run the risk of being shot down like any other home invader. Which is only as it should be.

I'm still surprised that the IN law is bringing about much rejoicing. The people simply haven't thought this one through.

Think about it- if somebody busts down your door at o-dark-thirty and you open fire, how do you think the police will respond? Will they step back, think it through, and double check everything? Or are they more likely to call in every reinforcement they have, shouting "He's shooting at us, GET THE BASTARD!"?

You might have legal coverage for trying to repel boarders in what turns out to be a search warrant at the wrong address, but that legal coverage isn't going to stop the bullets that the police will be shooting at you.

"Think about it- if somebody busts down your door at o-dark-thirty and you open fire, how do you think the police will respond?"

The same way they would in $WHICHEVER_STATE_YOU_LIVE_IN where this law isn't needed because you didn't have a boneheaded supreme court decision state that you had no right to bar a police officer from entering your home whether he had a warrant or not.

Thanks to Justice Stephen David's appalling ruling, if some drunken IMPD officer without a warrant tried to force his way through my front door, and I punched him in the nose, I'd be legally in the wrong, because the correct thing to do would be to let him in and do whatever he wants and then hope it gets ironed out in court.

If the FOP doesn't like the new law, they should go complain to the judge that made it necessary.

Tam, no arguments about that, but even so, the general modus operandi of the police department is to win what faces them and then sort things out later.

Even blocking Officer Friendly from your home is just going to escalate to tear gas.

Ultimately, the problem isn't even your Justice David, it's a system where there is no real accountability for police officers who, be it through incompetence, testosterone, or just plain bloody-mindedness, end up abusing their power and busting down the wrong door.

Until a SWAT team, upon callout, says "you know, we don't REALLY need to run a no-knock raid... there's too much risk; why not just wait for the guy to come out on a beer run and bust him then?" out of fear for their own careers/freedom, there isn't much that homeowners are able to do.